


FIVE THINGS THAT NEVER OFFICIALLY HAPPENED IN ANTIVA

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-20
Updated: 2011-10-20
Packaged: 2017-10-24 19:43:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/267156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Zevran week on tumblr. Zevran returns to Antiva to rock some boats. <i>Coming back was troublesome—but that was a literal assessment, a physical one, and not in the general sense of physicality that Zevran preferred.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	FIVE THINGS THAT NEVER OFFICIALLY HAPPENED IN ANTIVA

I.  
Coming back was troublesome—but that was a literal assessment, a physical one, and not in the general sense of _physicality_ that Zevran preferred. There were storms that rocked the boat—also not the general sense of _boat rocking_ that Zevran preferred—and sent the galleon off course for a time, while Zevran felt the lash and sting of salt water against his skin, against the heat that same skin held from the sun.

This was Fereldan weather, not Antivan, yet it followed him to the shores of Antiva City all the same, the old warmth of young arms missed especially in the night—physical assessments and boat rockings aside.

Then, the bounty of the docks and the stench of leather opened its arms, and Zevran realized it was possible to come back, even if it was not easy. Three old friends attempted to kill him that first night; yet what the sea could not manage, they could not, and from their dying breaths he heard news of the latest attempt on the Warden’s life.

As though any could manage it, he thought, and laughed to himself, which troubled his enemies—keeping them on their toes even when they were trussed up tight was itself a fine tactic—though there was something in Zevran’s chest also trussed, like a Feastday goose, an old Fereldan custom that had become colloquial, if not natural.

‘The difficulty, my old friends,’ he told them, testing the tip of a gifted dagger against the tip of a gifted leather glove, ‘is not that the _Crows_ lack imagination—ha ha, _no_ ; it is simply the _same_ imagination they display time after time, the same targets, the same methods… You see my disappointment, yes?’

They did not answer. They were already gagged. Zevran left them for the dockhands to find in the morning, having taken their purses to purchase this and that: a place to spend the next few nights, drink for gossip, a sheaf of vellum and ink and a pen.

In his brand new lodgings above a foul-mouthed taproom, he wrote to Amaranthine.

*

He only discovered, some months later, that the courier he had procured chose not to deliver his missive.

They never found the body.

II.  
Taliesin chose a different birthday for him to celebrate; for the gifts involved, and the pleasures, and the little gold _things_ that fit into his hand, warmed by his palm, lending the flesh a metal tang instead of the deeper rub of sweat and leather. Zevran enjoyed this—for who would not enjoy it?—but he had not chosen this day for himself, and there were times he wondered at the meaning of it all, at the rings that held poisons, at the presents that sheathed daggers.

He was sixteen. So many things were possible, and so many things were not.

‘Have you heard the story,’ he asked the merchant prince, sitting too close to his side by the picture window, ‘of the wooden elephant the Tevinters sent to the elves in Arlathan?’

‘I have heard it,’ the prince replied, ‘but I would rather hear it in _your_ voice.’

So Zevran spoke of the great wooden beast and the magisters within it, of the slaughter in the night, whatever made the best stories even better; with great relish, he told of the blood spilled on the soil, for great relish came from great sadness, all lust and despair like the sweetness of the flesh and the sour skin of any ripe fruit.

And then, as so many of these stories ended, he slit the prince’s throat.

‘And on your birthday, no less,’ Taliesin said, reaching out to clean the blood off Zevran’s cheek with his bare fingers. They smelled of metal, the sharp tang of the blade, and now they smelled of Zevran’s blood, too.

They lent new meaning to one another, but as Zevran’s ears were sharp and his thighs tawny, it was not always an even balance—and this, they both knew well.

III.  
The old city streets of his youth looked more or less the same, though the blood spatters had changed somewhat, so many he did not recognize, and enough to alter his memories of the cracked cobbles beneath—if he had ever truly known them at all. Zevran thought to himself how he would remark upon that to any who wished to hear—about the choices in remodeling, how he loved what they had done with the place—but there was none other than a stray alley-cat to listen to him chuckle, a hungry creature who reminded Zevran, in an overly prosaic moment, of himself.

‘All itches must be scratched,’ Zevran told it, ‘but you will pardon me, I hope, if I choose not to get fleas by touching you this evening. We both have our standards, I am sure.’

The cat acquiesced, then settled, to lick itself in a private place.

‘Ah,’ Zevran said. ‘Now you are just showing off. We cannot all be so agile, nor have so many lives, to practice the skills of our tongues.’

Though they were both animals of corners and shadows, who did not twitch a whisker or a lip at the idea of eating good garbage should there be no alternative, cats did not form guilds the same as roaming wolves formed packs, or crows in their nests flocked together when the weather turned cold.

Zevran still recalled their black bodes in the sky, traveling south toward Tevinter from Ferelden, and the moment he caught the Warden watching, the moment they turned and watched each other instead.

‘What an omen,’ Zevran had chosen to say. ‘I myself do not fly away so easily, however.’

But at that moment, there was some commotion from around a sharp corner, and Zevran pressed against the solid wall of once-baked brick, blades already in his hands, like claws unsheathed. His new friend the alley-cat knew when to leave, so as not to allow the destruction of its prior grooming, and Zevran enjoyed the moment—that a guildmaster was soon to die here, by a former member who had just engaged in clever conversation with a homeless animal.

IV.  
The first kill had already been committed during training. He had been a killer long before he actually killed, and so it did not matter when it occurred. The blood on the blade had been spilled before in his mind and he was ready for it, and it had nothing to do with carelessness, or the noise he made when slipping small through the window, knocking over an Orlesian vase. It would come at some point, and so it could have come at any point. It happened now or then or before or later, but preparation meant that it simply _was_ , and always had been.

As he stared down at his hands, this red color streaked and beginning to dry across the backs of his knuckles, he wondered if he would prefer poison, or if it was better this way—though in a sense, he knew he had already done both.

V.  
He had not finished what he had begun.

This was the truth about most men, at so many points in their lives, though he had notches on the bedpost for each of the guildmasters he had dealt with, a different system mocking the systems of his past—a different physicality, for example, or the rocking of a different boat.

He would not whittle down the wood until there was nothing left but a splinter. These reminders came at a cost, dulling the blade, and also, ruining the bedpost.

The couriers knew him better now; they were inclined to be more efficacious, and more devoted to their jobs. Zevran appreciated this, for at least they would not fall prey to the age-old defeat, starting something only to avoid ending it.

He supposed he had made Antiva City a better place—supposed, but did not wonder—while at the same time calling its very foundations into question. One might even say he had rocked this boat, too, another obscenely clever pun without any churlish dwarf or well-endowed mage with whom to share the notion.

But that was another matter for another day.

All this was not why he had come to Antiva—and all this was not why the Warden had come to Antiva, either. He had killed an archdemon; he wished to kill a guildmaster. Zevran was hopeful he wished for other things, in the meantime, private things in a private room, and in a real bed—if the one they shared could be classified as such, without too much squinting and bending.

Not all his memories need be marked with a flake cut from the wood. Not all his memories need be marked at all.

‘Officially,’ the Warden said, when he opened the door to find Zevran waiting for him just inside, ‘I’m not even here.’

‘Officially, I am not here either,’ Zevran replied.

 **END**

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [(illustrations for) FIVE THINGS THAT NEVER OFFICIALLY HAPPENED IN ANTIVA](https://archiveofourown.org/works/267173) by [payroo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/payroo/pseuds/payroo)




End file.
